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There’s an effort among Republican states to make it more difficult to vote by creating a new swarm of rules and restrictions that are designed to increase trust in the results of elections and to avert fraud.

Former state AG explains the act in Congress that would set federal election rules

³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Radio’s Dave Ross asked if we know how many cases of fraud have been discovered since the election.

“Vanishingly few,” he replied. “In every state where they’ve gone back and looked, and Republicans have really gone back and looked, they discovered two people, four people. I think there may be 17 people in Florida. It’s such incredibly small numbers. It’s really amazing, actually, given how many people voted, but obviously nothing on the scale that could swing a city council race, much less a presidential race.”

To Dave, the most important thing in a democracy is that the losers concede and go away — at least until they try again. This is the first election in his lifetime where that did not happen. So, he asks, if Texas and these other states pass all these rules, will it create the kind of secure and trustworthy elections that both sides will believe in?

“The cause of Republicans’ distrust in this election is not actual fraud. It’s not facts,” Fahrenthold said. “It’s not anything that these bills would fix, it’s that their candidate, Donald Trump, made baseless assertions and convinced a lot of people that he was cheated out of this election.”

“He said that even when there was no fraud, so I don’t know why changing the rules, reducing the number of people who can vote, reducing ways to vote would increase that trust if it’s based initially in a bad-faith claim,” he continued. “There’s a couple of states, Utah is one example, that are very Republican that are very liberal in their voting policies, lots of mail in voting, other ways to vote.”

Until Donald Trump connected the party to mail-in voting fraud, Fahrenthold says there was not a Republican feeling that vote by mail was untrustworthy.

“I think you’ve even seen Republican leaders talk about this, it’s an effort to reduce the number of people who vote, and with the idea that if you raise barriers to voting, more Republicans will vote and it’ll affect Democrats more than Republicans,” he explained.

There are some things, like the traditional “Souls to the Polls” that Black churches have done on Sundays before Election Day, he says, which could be impacted if you change in-person early voting, and may affect some Democrats more than Republicans.

“But mail-in voting — there’s been a lot of targeting of this year,” he continued. “That was traditionally a more Republican thing than Democrats. Democrats voted in person.”

“The only reason it mattered in 2020 was because Democrats are paying more attention to the pandemic than Republicans,’ Fahrenthold said. “I don’t think in 2022 or 2024 that will be the same case. So if you make it really hard to vote by mail, I don’t know if that’s going to help Republicans, or maybe it hurts some of their traditional voters.”

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